Baudelaire Quotes - page 2
![Oh Baudelaire... He used to be enormously important to me. It's thanks to him that I was able to get through the war [in Paris, during 1940 – 1945 Van Velde had a long and painful break, with only a few paintings he finished]. A true loyal mind without hypocrisy. The most universal spirit. The greatest Frenchman. I have always been much less interested in painters. (Bram van Velde)](https://cdn.quotesdtb.com/img/quotes_images_webp/00/bram-van-velde-able-767200.webp)
As we turn over the pages of nineteenth century literature, we are constantly confronted with the question of alienation. Baudelaire, Marx, Kierkegaard, Chateaubriand, Cardinal Newman - it does not matter whether the voice comes from the Left or the Right; all are agreed in their rejection of the values of the prevailing ethic. Yet we never get a clear definition of alienation: what is man alienated from, and why? Perhaps it is precisely the democratic society, the growing affluence and education, that have revealed the natural state of man - much as the development of medicine has enabled greater accuracy of diagnosis, with the resultant tremendous increase in the record of certain diseases. Perhaps the discovery of human self-alienation was simply a statistical refinement made possible by the spread of the privileges of culture to the middle classes.
Kenneth Rexroth
The poet, says Baudelaire, is a decipherer, a Kabbalist of reality, a decoder. Ordinary life, if it is not a message in code, a system of symbols for something else, is unacceptable. It must be a cryptogram; it can't be what it seems. The poet's task is to decode the incomprehensible obvious. His life becomes a deliberately constructed paranoia, as Rimbaud, Breton, Artaud were to say generations later.
As we read him, we discover that Baudelaire believes in the charm, the incantation, the cryptogram, but he ceases to believe in the secret. The spirits have not risen. The code says nothing. This is the mystery concealed by the disorder of the world. The visionary experience ends in itself; the light of the illuminated comes only from and falls only on himself.
Kenneth Rexroth
But is this wonder the real thing? At first glance, it wouldn't seem to be: a transcendence that's chemically induced must surely be fake. Artificial Paradises was what Charles Baudelaire called his 1860 book about his experiences with hashish, and that sounds about right. Yet what if it turns out that the neurochemistry of transcendence is no different whether you smoke marijuana, meditate or enter a hypnotic trance by way of chanting, fasting, or prayer? What if in every one of these endeavors, the brain is simply prompted to produce large quantities of cannabinoids, thereby suspending short-term memory and allowing us to experience the present deeply?...From a brain's point of view, the distinction between a natural and an artificial high may be meaningless.
Michael Pollan
Of the pleasures and pains of opium much has been written. The ecstasies and horrors of De Quincey and the paradis artificiels of Baudelaire are preserved and interpreted with an art which makes them immortal, and the world knows well the beauty, the terror and the mystery of those obscure realms into which the inspired dreamer is transported. But much as has been told, no man has yet dared intimate the nature of the phantasms thus unfolded to the mind, or hint at the direction of the unheard-of roads along whose ornate and exotic course the partaker of the drug is so irresistibly borne.
H. P. Lovecraft
«She is able to oscillate between classical allusions to the holy books and the works of great poets like Hölderlin, Baudelaire, Borges, Artaud and Celan, and then she comes to terms with the Beat Generation, with Ferlinghetti, Corso, with the philosophy of the existentialists. With immediate acceptances, repulses, with vast ignitions and immense fires, with echoes of jazz and pop music» (Dante Maffia about Fatti deprecabili/Deprecable Facts)
Caterina Davinio
Over many years (I am almost 72) so many poets have touched my imagination and opened paths for me-it hardly makes sense to list them. I have always read a great deal of poetry. Some poets-like Robert Lowell, Denise Levertov, Randall Jarrell, Jean Valentine, Audre Lorde, Hayden Carruth, Jane Cooper, June Jordan, Joy Harjo, Clayton Eshelman-have been my friends, we've been comrades in exchanging work and encouraging each other... But I've also been powerfully affected by Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, Muriel Rukeyser, Aimé Césaire, Robert Duncan-poets I met briefly if at all. Baudelaire, Sachs, Celan, Ghalib, Mandelstam...all in translation. This kind of influence isn't textual, exactly-it's like having windows open on "what is possible.” And this kind of intensive reading of many poets, and dialogues with a few, seems to me more fertilizing to a poet's life than immersion in workshops.
Adrienne Rich
